A Georgetown University history professor who says the country’s most momentous labor dispute has altered the course of American labor relations will speak at Nebraska Wesleyan University on Tuesday, April 23.
Joseph McCartin, professor of history at Georgetown University and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, will deliver the lecture, “The Accidental Reagan Revolution: How a 1981 Strike Still Haunts American Workers and Politics.”
McCartin says the country’s most momentous labor dispute of the last half-century, the 1981 walkout of the members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, — which was broken by President Ronald Reagan — was an event that altered the course of American labor relations and politics in ways that still echo today.
He is the author of the new book, “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.” He is also the author of “Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and Origins of Modern American Labor Relations,” which won the 1999 Philip Taft Prize for best book in American labor history.
His lecture at Nebraska Wesleyan begins at 7 p.m. in Olin B Lecture Hall, located one block east of 50th Street and St. Paul Ave. It is free and open to the public.